It’s best embodied by the iconic airplane that the newsletter is named after. All of these enthusiasms are unified by a nostalgia-flecked appreciation for rigorous design thinking. The pair, who live in Oakland, California, introduced the newsletter in the quiet first weeks of the coronavirus shutdown as an outlet for their long-standing interest in offbeat things: Y2K-era sneakers, hand-dyed Japanese bucket hats, the vast spectrum of outdoor technical gear (or GORP, in Blackbird parlance), and eBay deep digs. Published twice weekly on Substack, “Blackbird Spyplane” is a co-creation of Jonah Weiner, a culture journalist, and Erin Wylie, a talent scout for Apple. Or, in Spyplane speak: it provides “unbeatable recon” about “dope under-the-radar joints.” With a precision befitting its military eponym, the newsletter articulates style concerns yet to be uttered in the public sphere.
With a slight bias toward menswear, the newsletter is obsessed with the unique, nostalgic, perplexing, and beautiful garments (and objects) that exist outside the grid of e-commerce. Now, more than a year since its first renegade musings, “Blackbird Spyplane” has become an inimitable clearing house for writing about clothes. And André Benjamin, or the half of OutKast better known as André 3000, opened up about the origins of his slogan T-shirts in support of Black Lives Matter and the history of one of his favorite garments: a tattered and faded green army jacket with a photo of his son when he was two years old stitched on the back. Jerry Seinfeld learned of his elevation into a nineties style icon and gushed about his 1962 Volkswagen Beetle. The singer Lorde shared pictures from her trek through Antarctica, in 2019, and talked about E.C.W. In the middle of last year, a style newsletter began to appear in e-mail in-boxes, asking existential-sounding questions: “Did your parents let you DRIP to the fullest?” “Is it ever cool to dress like a cop?” “Is swag genetic?” “What’s AFTER FLEECE?” “Would socialism KILL cool clothes?” and “Are you wearing CURSED GORP?” The name of the sender only added to the mystique: Blackbird Spyplane-a reference not to an earthbound streetwear label or a fashion genre but to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, an elegant high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft deployed by the United States Air Force during the Cold War.įrom out of nowhere, or like a supersonic culture craft, “Blackbird Spyplane” began to drop introspective interviews with the kind of celebrity gets that make style editors click with envy.